Lightning Bolt is very powerful. Indeed, it’s too powerful to put in most formats. Being able to deal with quite a few threats with only one mana is extremely efficient and makes many creatures basically unplayable, which in turn makes designing sets more difficult, as any creature meant to be constructed playable than needs to dodge the Bolt or be very cheap.

As you have probably heard, since you’re here, WotC announced a new format today. It’s known as Brawl. If you didn’t hear about, you can find it here. Basically 60 card Commander with Standard legal cards, 30 starting life and some rules they apparently haven’t really thought through on when the commander goes to the Command Zone.

As usual, there are some potentially very impactful cards hidden in the final bunch of spoilers. One of them could very well be this one.

I didn’t really expect that to be back any time soon, as they have recently nerfed this ability somewhat, but it is a good answer to Eternalize. However, in Standard, just the tempo can also be important.

A less talked about card, Faith of the Devoted could be the key card in a deck much like the more popular brewing target Drake Haven, but with colors I enjoy more in Standard. Not that the pair is generally very well supported, but doesn’t mean I can’t try.

Even if this one isn’t actually the bomb certain people want it to be, I don’t see why I couldn’t dream about using it. This could be Grixis as well, but the mana requirements might be a bit too much, although we could probably just use the cycle-duals to splash something. I’m not entirely sure what, though.